PlayBook: Four More Years

By Fraser LockerbieNovember 3, 2012

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The Anti-Endorsement: betting the farm on Four More Years plus this week's NFL lines and picks.

Mitt Romney doesn’t seem like much of a football fan these days; in fact, he doesn’t seem like much of anything at all. He’s got a serious case of The Bends from all the pressure boiling up in his brain and it’s starting to permeate the soft tissue of his spine. Sources close to him say it’s beginning to affect his basic survival instinct, that The Candidate is reeling and has to routinely be locked up in a decompression chamber for ten or twelve hours at a time to avoid being overcome by catatonic despair, the terminally crippling sensation that comes over a person when the daunting reality sets in that soon, soon you might have to reap all the fat shit you’ve sown and pay back all the hard-bought ugly favors and straw poll support you’ve borrowed from every two-bit political hustler who’s smelled even faintly of money or power.

Right. And that’s it in a nutshell, running for president on the campaign trail in 2012. It’s an ugly trip and not one taken lightly by the old-time party bosses who don’t like to see The Candidate crippled by something as serious as Campaign Bloat this close to the critical date.

Wait. What’s that? Campaign Bloat? For those of you who don’t know, Campaign Bloat was identified and perhaps described best by the Good Doctor back in 1972 as…

“…a gruesome kind of false fat condition that is said to be connected somehow with failing adrenal glands. The swelling begins within twenty-four hours of that moment when the victim first begins to suspect that the campaign is essentially meaningless. At that point, the body’s entire adrenaline supply is sucked back into the gizzard, and nothing either candidate says, does, or generates will cause it to rise again…and without adrenaline, the flesh begins to swell; the eyes fill with blood and grow smaller in the face, the jowls puff out from the cheekbones, the neck-flesh droops, and the belly swells up like a frog’s throat…The brain fills with noxious waste fluids, the tongue is rubbed raw on the molars, and the basic perception antennae begin dying like hairs in a bonfire.” (Rolling Stone, September, 1972).

Yes. Yes, that’s it. That must be what The Candidate is going through. I don’t know how we didn’t spot it sooner; all the signs were there: the compulsive and previously repressed urge to gamble, the spewing of bad, shocking gibberish on live TV, an inability to compose a coherent thought, deterioration of social graces, lack of filter and finally a foaming at the mouth as the eyes roll back into the head and the central nervous system goes, leaving the body completely useless and acting of its own accord.

The terminal stages of Campaign Bloat are indeed a sight rarely seen; rarely do we get to witness in full view a candidate who is so close to the White House he feels he might be able to ooze his way in through the windows while everyone else is asleep. That absurd notion comes from the dementia which is another pervading symptom of The Bloat and one that will not soon recede; when the deal goes down and Romney’s left on the outside looking in, he’ll flip and spend the rest of his days barking like a dog on command every time some snake like Eric Cantor or Reince Priebus snaps their ugly little fingers.

And that’s that. Mitt Romney is done in this business. Very few people come back from a twice-failed presidential bid, and the ones that do typically have to be handled with care. No one who stands straight up and asks for your vote should in the same breath offend so many others and be elected to the highest office in the land for doing so. Mitt Romney has made a habit of blundering badly through every social policy issue he’s faced and we should not reward him for doing so.

Selah. For what it’s worth and in case I hadn’t made it abundantly clear, I’d be voting for Obama on Tuesday; Vegas has him pegged at 9/4 to take 290-309 electoral college votes, and that seems about right. I’ll be betting the farm on Four More Years.